Table of contents

Certain to engage scholars, students, and general readers alike, Evolution and Ethics offers a balanced, levelheaded, constructive approach to an often divisive debate.

This interdisciplinary collection presents novel theories, includes provocative re-workings of longstanding arguments, and offers a healthy cross-pollination of ideas to the morality literature. Structures, functions, and content of morality are reconsidered as cultural, religious, and political components are added to the standard biological/environmental mix. Innovative concepts such as the Periodic Table of Ethics and evidence for morality in non-human species illuminate areas for further discussion and research. And some of the book’s contributors question premises we hold dear, such as morality as a product of reason, the existence of moral truths, and the motto “life is good.” Highlights of the coverage: The tripartite theory of Machiavellian morality: judgment, influence, and conscience as distinct moral adaptations. Prosocial morality from a biological, cultural, and developmental perspective. The containment problem and the evolutionary debunking of morality. A comparative perspective on the evolution of moral behavior. A moral guide to depravity: religiously-motivated violence and sexual selection. Game theory and the strategic logic of moral intuitions. The Evolution of Morality makes a stimulating supplementary text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in the evolutionary sciences, particularly in psychology, biology, anthropology, sociology, political science, religious studies, and philosophy

Fourteen original essays by philosophers, theologians, and social scientists explore the challenges to moral and religious belief posed by disagreement and evolution. The collection represents both sceptical and non-skeptical positions about morality and religion, cultivates new insights, and moves the discussion forward in illuminating ways.

'Darwinism as Religion' argues that the theory of evolution given by Charles Darwin in the 19th-century has always functioned as much as a secular form of religion as anything purely scientific. Through the words of novelists and poets, Michael Ruse argues that Darwin took us from the secure world of Christian faith into a darker, less friendly world of chance and lack of meaning.

Biologist Donald Broom argues that morality and the central components of religion are of great value, and presents two central ideas: that morality has a biological foundation and has evolved as a consequence of natural selection, and secondly, that religions are essentially structures underpinning morality.

From author, Charles E. Kupchella comes a new contender for one of the best book on evolutionary psychology, a book exploring the connections between evolution, ethics and morality. Religion is thought by many to be the source of morality. It isn't. Morality came to us through biological evolution and rudiments of it can be found in many other social animals. Morality-enabled collaboration reached its epitome in Homo sapiens allowing our species to thrive and to bring civilization to its present state -- such as it is. While other books have addressed the biological origins of morality, this one goes much further into the mechanisms of evolution and into what cultural-evolution and specifically religion did with morality as it arose biologically. This book makes the point that although cultural evolution, with religion as a component, gave us ways to reinforce our inborn sense of morality, but religion has also been divisive. Religious "fences" keep us from seeing ourselves as part of one family of humankind. Today, religious differences and the tendency of blind faith to thwart critical thinking and to work its way into and confound politics and even education stand in the way of humankind's continued moral-maturation.